The "duct tape programmer" is just as dangerous as the "astronaut architect".

What distinguishes good architects from these fools is this:

A good architect is someone with the experience to know when to cut corners and when to enforce rigid discipline.

It has nothing to do with scanning books.

Google gets sued and comes up with a settlement agreement to pay off those suing.

Little company X does the same thing and gets sued, but can't fight the suit and can't afford to pay off a settlement.

Because the grounds for suing are completely bogus, Google is essentially buying a monopoly with their settlement. They are now establishing that anyone who wants to do what they are doing will have to pay hush money to avoid a lawsuit.

Big expensive hush money for fair use.

The settlement is for a bogus lawsuit.

The problem is this: Google has the ability to pay their way out of this nuisance lawsuit. Others do not. Thus Google ends up with a defacto monopoly.

From the author's perspective, however, there is no ability to pursue a bogus lawsuit to a conclusion more favorable than free money they shouldn't be getting in the first place.

Of course William Morris is against it. The settlement is bad for them and bad for our society. It's bad for authors, even. But the only thing worse for authors is opting out of the settlement.

You could do something significantly more professional like Aria or Zuora. There is no awareness on the customer side of being redirected to another site, and it beats maintaining your own PCI level 1 compliant infrastructure.

I'd rather have government run health care than any insurance company (who, by the way, lose laptops and forget to wipe hard drives).

/. should not be a forum for perpetrating common ignorance, such as the comment,

"What's more, the number of Flash users is based on a questionable internet survey of just 4,600 people â" around 0.0005% of the suggested 956,000,000 total. Is it really possible that 99% penetration could have been reached?"

They really needed to survey just 1,000 people to get a statistically meaningful survey.

It does not pass the smell test because it leaves out a number of important devices we know to exist on the Internet (for example, the iPhone).

The problem is almost certainly sample bias. 1,000 data points is significantly relevant if your sample is truly random and not skewed towards a particular subgroup. Sample bias means that your mechanism for picking who you sampled would be more likely to pull data points from a specific subgroup. For example, a methodology that discouraged responses from people on mobile devices.

Who wants to use a tool with crap IDE integration?

Find an employer that supports your objectives. Many do.

The catch is that you will get paid less. Flexibility has value.

This is a failure on your part. Bean counters are not penny-wise, pound foolish. They do need a concrete financial analysis, however, to prove that you aren't just blowing smoke up their skirt.

Because most of the time, programmers are doing just that.

And also, programmers often fail to understand the cost of money and that sometimes it is better spend more tomorrow than a little bit today.